Thursday, September 4, 2025
DR Koncerthuset, Copenhagen
A single if unfinished Symphony, and a conductor, now 98, with unfinished business – Herbert Blomstedt will keep going, fuelled by music… here into Bruckner’s three last-will-and-testament movements, the Ninth Symphony, floated-in on a mysterious just-audible tremolo, the first movement structurally sound, ebbed and flowed within it without disturbing wholeness, although the slightest of pauses and a couple of accents seemed ‘new’ discoveries for Blomstedt, an inveterate (re-)studier of scores. (Recently, a friend remarked that he “doesn’t know what a holiday is.”) Following was a measured Scherzo with its share of menace, and a Trio that was rightly quicker to underline its macabre character. The Adagio, not intended as the final movement, and conducted as such by Blomstedt, leaving the door open, nevertheless conveyed sadness, nostalgia and trepidation – here a farewell without mawkishness, music that glows in the dark, reaches an agonising dissonant climax, and in its wake asks “what’s next?”, welded as-one by Blomstedt, part of an entity lasting just short of an hour – which felt about right – played with devotion, greeted by a long silence before enthusiastic applause was heard.